This little housing project for 30 poor families of squatters and room-renters, in Yangon's North Okkalapa Township, was the second to be built by women savings group members, with support from Women for the World.

Since 2009, some of Yangon’s poorest women squatters have been coming together, starting savings groups and developing their own housing solutions, with support from a small NGO called Women for the World. Using their savings, they have collectively bought tracts of inexpensive agricultural land, subdivided them into small plots and built their own extremely low-cost houses, with basic infrastructure. They have now built a dozen projects which provide secure, affordable housing to a thousand vulnerable families.  Taw Win was the first project for which they were able to obtain loans from a microfinance company.
 

This large housing project for 264 poor families of squatters and room-renters, in Yangon's Shwepyitha Township, was the first to be built under the new collaborative Mae Myit Thar housing scheme, in which the government provided free land to allow the collective and community-driven housing model already developed in 12 other projects to scale up, with support from the local NGO Women for the World.

In this large collective housing project in one of Yangon’s industrializing suburbs, a group of poor women squatters and room renters worked with a small NGO called Women for the World to design and build their own extremely low-cost houses, on land that was given to them free by the Yangon Regional Government, on long-term collective user rights.  The project was the second to bring a collective and community-driven delivery model into the government’s program of low-cost housing for the poor, and represented a dramatic scaling up of the self-help housing model that had already been pioneered in twelve earlier projects. 

This housing project made history in many ways.  It was Nepal’s first-ever community-planned and community-managed resettlement project for squatters who were evicted to make way for a public infrastructure project.   It  was also the first time that substantial municipal funds were invested in a jointly-managed fund that  would finance this first project, and then revolve to finance other initiatives by poor communities in Kathmandu.  The  project showed how collaboration, flexible finance and the development force of communities themselves can solve a city’s housing problems in fast, simple and inexpensive ways.